Coming to America: How torture ended up being used in a Chicago black site
by Ryan Cooper, The Week
March 2, 2015

In 1929, President Herbert Hoover named a commission to study crime, headed by George Wickersham. The ensuing report mainly focused its attention on alcohol prohibition, which was fueling a massive growth in organized crime. But the commission also found much wanting in American police departments. One section of the report, on police malpractice, became a landmark in the history of American policing.

In those days, torture was common in American police departments, commonly referred to as giving suspects the “third degree.” The Wickersham report detailed how brutal interrogations were not just a violation of constitutional rights, but part of general incompetence that let many criminals escape punishment.

It led to a massive overhaul of policing across the nation, as the scholar Darius Rejali documented in his book Torture and Democracy. Following a series of Supreme Court cases, some of which cited the Wickersham report, courts began tossing out convictions obtained through torture. Reforms were implemented that gradually expunged torture from most American policing.

That work is right now being undone. American police are re-embracing torture in just the way that experts like Rejali said we would. Torture has a long history in American police departments, and if vigilance is not maintained, it will crop up again and again. The Obama administration’s cowardly unwillingness to pursue any accountability at all for CIA torturers during the Bush era has all but ensured that fact.

Though most routine police torture was gone by the 1950s or so, there were some important exceptions. In Chicago, for example, torture has likely never been fully expelled from the police department. The infamous torturer Jon Burge, recently released from prison, was part of a systematic torture ring in the city’s Area 2. Fired from the police force in 1993, he was later convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for perjury.

More recently, Guardian reporter Spencer Ackerman published a series of amazing stories about another Chicago detective named Richard Zuley, who allegedly tortured people before Sept. 11, leading to several false convictions. Later, Zuley was part of the torture team at Guantanamo Bay.

However, Burge himself probably learned his torture techniques during his time in the Vietnam War. As Rejali argues, Burge’s preferred method, electroshock torture using a magneto, was common during that war, when it was done with the magneto from a hand-cranked field telephone.

The point isn’t quite that overseas torture has come back to haunt us. Rather it shows how the borders between all the various domestic and overseas security services are highly permeable. Torture techniques are passed in both directions, and can persist for decades even in the face of determined efforts to stamp them out.

Torture will always be a temptation among the most reactionary police and spooks, like the ones who unironically cite the Col. Jessup speech justifying murder from A Few Good Men. They portray themselves as the macho tough guys willing to do the dirty work to fight crime, in spite of any sissy liberal laws. That is, in fact, the position of virtually the whole Republican Party.

So if there aren’t very strong norms and institutions in place to investigate and halt torture, and if the laws against it aren’t even enforced, then wannabe fascists in police departments everywhere will choose the rubber hose over the microscope and the notebook.

That brings me to another Ackerman scoop from last week. He revealed that Chicago police have been running an off-the-books interrogation center at Homan Square, where detainees could be tortured without being booked or processed. It strongly smacks of the infamous CIA black sites that once proliferated around the globe, but the torture is classically American.

At The Intercept, one former detainee described what it was like when he was held there in 2006:

“When we first got in there it was room-temperature, and before he [a Chicago police officer] left, he was like, ‘It’s gon’ get a little hot in here,'” says Hutcherson, now 29. For six hours, a sweaty Wright sat zip-tied to a bench with no access to a restroom, a telephone, or water. “They strapped me—like across, kind of—to a bench, and my hands were strapped on both sides of me,” he says. “I can’t even scratch my face.”

“They were badgering me with questions. ‘Tell me about this murder!'” one officer shouted. Wright provided his interrogator with false information and names, with the hope of making it stop. He told me he was “trying to get out of the situation and give them something they wanted.”

A hot, stifling room, endless questioning, and sleep deprivation are a set of techniques Rejali calls “sweating.” Before the Wickersham report, it was the most common form of American torture. It very well may be again.

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Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.

On June 5, 1968, I awoke in a pool of blood when Robert Kennedy’s assassination the night before was breaking news. I had just had my wisdom teeth removed, and I bled into my pillow all night. At 1:44 am the next day, Robert Kennedy died from his wounds at age 42. He had hung onto life for 26 hours.

Yet his lingering death has faded from memory. What I remember most is the coincidence of the assassination and the bloody pillow. That, and the sight of Kennedy’s flag-draped casket being transported to Arlington Cemetery the evening of June 8. I had returned to Washington DC, where I was living at the time, and was one of the thousands of people who lined the streets to witness his nighttime cortege.

I had just turned 20 at the time, and ever since that event, I lost faith in government to initiate positive change. I concluded at that time that the best leaders in America are more likely to take a bullet in the head than to receive government support for their attempts to innovate. For almost two decades, I was a drop-out from any involvement in the public sphere until 1986, when I decided to create a nature park on the site of former railroad yards adjacent to my neighborhood in Minneapolis. My approach was to do it as an entirely private affair, to do it without government.

The effort began modestly enough with the accumulation of trash into several piles which grew to such a size that no one assumed they were the result of a single person working alone. I had fostered this impression by disappearing from view whenever the rare hiker happened along. I believed it would be more effective if the trash piles just appeared and people’s imaginations took over.

I was correct. As my mother used to say, people are more prone to supporting an idea if they think it is their brainchild, not ours.

On April 20, 1989, sixty-five neighbors held a public meeting which led to the founding of “Save Cedar Lake Park” (my name), and I sat at the back of the room with a friend and collaborator who was one of the few people who’d known about the extent of my involvement with the project. We sat there like a couple secret conspirators, watching what our unknown efforts had started.

By the time I left Minneapolis and moved to West Texas in 2002, we had established the park of our dreams, created the first of several “commuting” pedestrian and bike trails that had mushroomed into a region-wide network of trails, raised millions of dollars, and involved thousands of people in the realization of the vision. All the while I helped establish the direction from the back of the bus.

I still remember the look on the park superintendent’s face after he’d just told me there could be no public money for the project. “That’s okay,” I said immediately, “we’ll do it ourselves.” We raised the money and public support first, and then government followed our lead.

The few times over those years that I flirted with taking a more traditional leadership role, the experiments always ended badly and I concluded that I was more effective in getting my way if I sublimated my ego and let others appear to call the shots. This way, too, I was not a target for my views.

In 2005 I began to see a need, through my involvement in The King Brothers Trust, for someone to advocate for kids from screwed-up family backgrounds who had killed a parent. I resolved to do whatever a single individual could do to make things better by giving these kids a second chance at life.

From the time of the ancient Romans when children were considered the property of their parents (no matter how abusive or ill-suited they were to the task), parricide was considered the most reprehensible of crimes. The Roman punishment for juvenile parricides was to sew the youth into a bag with a snake, a dog, and a rooster, to beat it, and to throw the bag into a river where it was washed out to sea. Though the parents are usually responsible for a child defying nature and killing one or both of them, we have not moved much beyond the brutality of the ancient Romans.

I know that this is an unpopular cause. I know that most of these kids are severely damaged, sometimes irreversibly so. Our prisons only make it worse. Decades of prison is the modern-day equivalent of throwing a bag into a river. We have to figure out a better way.

It took me seven years to find Estrella Vista, and it will have taken me seven more years to pay for it and add sixty acres to the original twenty. We are only about $13,000 from that goal. Once completed, this property will provide a permanent refuge for young people that society has consigned to a canvas bag.

Even when I have been able to do nothing else, I have been able to write… and since January 2010 (and a year before that by email), I have been publishing the Wandervogel Diary almost every day. We are nearing a million visitors and have supporters from all over the world. Using this blog as a platform, we have also raised the money necessary to mount several legal appeals, send books, tuition and commissary deposits to kids who are imprisoned, and provide transportation and living support for the two kids who have been released from prison.

Some might say our efforts are insufficient in comparison to the true dimensions of the problem. But what we can accomplish is what we can do, and we have never flagged from our commitment. Government will never lead the way. It needs us to do that.

Thank you for your faithful commitment. We have already made a difference and will continue to do so.

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“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?“

The entire juvenile justice system is premised upon one bedrock principle. It’s an immutable fact that our parents and forebears have known for millennia, and it’s something that science is increasingly backing up: Juveniles are different.

They are irresponsible. They say the darndest things. I believe children are our future; teach them well and let them see the way. Show them all the beauty—well, everything Whitney Houston said in that song, you get the point.

The bottom line, according to the court, is that these differences diminish the traditional penological justifications for harsh punishment of juveniles—even when they commit the most horrific crimes. The juvenile justice system is different because kids are different.

“The most noteworthy features of adolescent brain development relate to changes occurring within the brain’s frontal lobes—in particular the prefrontal cortex—and in the connections between the prefrontal cortex and other brain structures. These areas and interconnections are critical to ‘executive’ functions such as planning, motivation, judgment, and decisionmaking, including the evaluation of future consequences, the weighing of risk and reward, the perception and control of emotions, and the processing and inhibition of impulses,” the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association of Social Workerswrote in a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the Supreme Court in 2012.

This research—plus our firmly entrenched notions about juvenile responsibility—have informed the operation of our juvenile justice system since its inception. Instead of punishment and incarceration, the juvenile system focuses on treatment and rehabilitation.

At least that’s the theory. But how is it executed? Typically, a juvenile court can send a child to a secure educational facility instead of prison, and juvenile courts generally lose jurisdiction over children at a statutory age—usually anywhere from 21 to 25. Their juvenile records are customarily sealed and not public like adult criminal records. The idea is this: Once you are an adult, you get a fresh start. After all, your childish behavior is now behind you.

Unless—well, unless what you did was really, really, really bad. In that case? You’re going to prison at Shawshank with the rest of the adults.

Although all states differ, the general rule is this: Juvenile court has jurisdiction over a child unless he or she is alleged to have committed something awful, like murder or attempted murder, and then the case is automatically (or at the discretion of the court or prosecutor) placed in adult court, where the child is subject to adult penalties.

But what happened to all that “prefrontal cortex” talk and the Supreme Court, and “children are fundamentally different”?

Apparently, children are different—but if they really make us angry, they can go be different in prison.

It’s a paradox. We treat children according to their developmental culpability, with a colossal exception: If the consequences of their behavior are really serious, we instead deal with them according to the outcome—even though the biological genesis of that behavior remains exactly the same. If a child punches an adult, the child may land in juvenile court. If a child punches an adult, and that adult falls and dies, then the child might be in adult court. Same root causes of bad behavior, different judicial outcome. The neurology remains the same in all cases, but we inconsistently demand disparate treatment.

Why the judicial hypocrisy? It’s as if society is saying it acknowledges all the science about adolescent brain development and is fine with it as long as we’re talking about crimes like spray-painting cars, smoking pot, or a fistfight at school. But for those most egregious crimes like murder, the scientific mumbo jumbo goes out the window. When kids kill, society wants retribution. Adult-style retribution.

Maybe it’s just legislative recognition of what we ultimately believe: Sure, child development has as a general rule that kids are redeemable, but there are exceptions to every rule. Some kids are just bad to the bone—they are trouble, and they will always be trouble. And if your mind just wandered to a specific kid in your neighborhood, maybe you agree with that concept. But there’s probably one notable exception: your own kid. Your little snowflake is really a good kid and would never do anything wrong.

When it comes to the juvenile system, we should address the inconsistency; it borders on hypocrisy. If we agree the juvenile mind is less culpable, we should treat it that way, without exception.

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Danny Cevallos is a CNN legal analyst, criminal defense attorney and partner at Cevallos & Wong, practicing in Pennsylvania and the US Virgin Islands.

Today is the first day of the fortnight (February 27 – March 13) governed by the rune Tyr, alternatively known as Tiwaz.

Its arrow-like form represents the quality of steady, reliable, positive, and purposeful regulation. It is associated with the deity Tyr (or Tiw), the sky god, the god of law and justice, and the ruler of the Thing (the ancient German assembly). Tyr is associated with the Northern Star Polaris (around which the fixed stars in the night sky appear to rotate). Ancient seamen used Polaris as their main navigational aid in their long journeys, and the symbol of an arrow pointing upward is perhaps made in reference to this.

The rune is also associated with Yggdrasil, an immense ash tree that is central to Nordic cosmology, the mythic axis mundi of the Germans (a world column which terminates at the northern pole star and around which the earth revolves). The gods were believed go to Yggdrasil daily to assemble at their Thing. It is said that Tyr guided the Thing to conform to the law and justice—the world order. The rune Tyr and Yggdrasil were merged in the Irminsul, pictured here as a silver pin from my collection. The T-like “wings” of the Irminsul suggest the vault of the heavens.

The rune teaches one that to achieve the greatest effect, we must concentrate our energies and resources in time and space. This is the essence of strategy and Tyr is thus known as the rune of victory.

To fully understand the rune Tyr, it is important to consider it in relation to its opposite, Rad, on the Runic Compass. Tyr and Rad in combination suggest something akin to Karma (looking backwards) and Dharma (looking forwards). The wisdom of Tyr urges focused purpose and progression through time into the future. (“It is always on its way,” as the Old English Rune Poem says.) I think of Tyr as representing the arrow of time.

Because of the rune’s association with the god Tyr, the concept of self-sacrifice is an important aspect of its lesson and ideal. Tyr is a one-handed god with a long history, and his hand was sacrificed to trick the wolf, Fenris, into being chained.

As the story is told in the Prose Edda, Fenris was one of Loki’s children by a giantess. From the time Fenris was a pup, the gods kept Fenris with them in Asgard and Tyr was the only god with the courage to feed and care for the wolf. However, as Fenris kept eating and growing, it became clear to the gods that Fenris might become so large and powerful that he would become a mortal threat to them all and might even threaten the stability of the world.

Not wanting to kill the son of one of their own, the gods tried various methods of binding and restraining the wolf, but Fenris broke free from every means of tether attempted.

Finally, the gods got the dwarfs to craft a thread-like binding made from six impossible things including the sound of a cat’s footfall, a mountain’s roots, a fish’s breath. When this binding was completed, they called Fenris to try it on him. The gods assured Fenris that he would be able to break free of this thread as easily as all the other bindings, but this time Fenris suspected their deceit. He refused to be bound unless one of the gods would place his hand in the wolf’s jaws as assurance. The only god who dared to do so was Tyr. When the dwarfs’ binding proved unbreakable and he realized he’d been tricked, Fenris snapped off Tyr’s hand at the wrist.

Tyr allowed Fenris to bite off his right hand in order to bind the wolf’s chaotic force and thus physically and spiritually saved his fellow gods and the world from destruction. Tyr thus proved he was courageous, fearless, the master tactician, and a consummate diplomat.

The story, and the rune itself, teach us that we must be prepared to accept self-sacrifice if we are to succeed in a role of leadership and service.

As you know, we have four young men in Texas who were convicted as adults of parricide while they were still juveniles. In Moon v. Texas, the appellate court vacated a criminal conviction on the basis that the juvenile court improperly waived its jurisdiction.

It seems that many juvenile courts in Texas have been using the same template for orders to waive jurisdiction, which has led appelate courts in Texas to hand down favorable rulings based on arguments similar to Moon v. Texas.

This development was brought to my attention by one of our kids, Austin Eversole, who has been looking into the possibility of mounting an appeal based on the new ruling, arguing that the waiver of jurisdiction from the juvenile court was legally deficient. If Austin’s order used the same template as referred to above, he may have a strong argument.

We have two other kids serving 40-year and 99-years sentences, respectively, and this approach may offer a basis to mount appeals on multiple fronts. (The fourth kid is eligible for parole in about a year.) If successful appeals were mounted, they could have their convictions in the adult courts vacated.

I have shared this possibility with our law firm, Kutmus, Pennington and Hook.

Yesterday I heard from them and they were excited by the prospect. Obviously, each case needs to be researched to determine whether an appeal is warranted. But we are determined to move forward.

Here is a write-up of the new climate for Texas appeals by a source that is far more knowledgeable than me at evaluating its potential: the Juvenile Law Center of Philadelphia PA.

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The State of Texas v. Cameron Moon

by The Juvenile Law Center

In a landmark case, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals ruled that the juvenile court erred in failing to conduct an individualized assessment of a 16 year-old’s circumstances before ordering that the youth be tried as an adult. In State v. Cameron Moon, the Texas high court affirmed a ruling vacating Cameron’s transfer to adult court, finding the record factually insufficient to justify the decision. The opinion criticized the juvenile court’s order for simply reciting the transfer statute, and held that juvenile courts must do the “the heavy lifting” of demonstrating their reasons for transfer if they expect their decisions to be upheld on appeal.

Cameron Moon was indicted for murder when he was 16 years-old. Prior to this incident, he had only one misdemeanor conviction for keying a car. The state asked the juvenile court to order that Cameron stand trial as an adult. At Cameron’s hearing, the state presented no evidence about the factors the judge was legally required to consider before ordering transfer other than the fact that he was charged with a serious offense. By contrast, Cameron’s team provided uncontradicted testimony that the youth lacked sophistication and maturity and he was highly amenable to rehabilitation in the juvenile system. Nevertheless, the motion was granted. Moon was later found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In a well-reasoned opinion, an intermediate appellate court found that the juvenile court’s findings—that Cameron was of sufficient sophistication and maturity and there was little prospect of public protection and rehabilitation in the juvenile system—were unsupported by the evidence. The intermediate court also rejected the state’s argument that the nature of the offense standing alone justified transfer, stating that such an interpretation would render the Texas statute meaningless.

In ruling against the state on appeal, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals noted that under the state statute, evidence of a sufficiently egregious offense is enough to justify a waiver of jurisdiction under Texas law. By contrast, in Cameron’s case the juvenile court merely pointed to the category of the alleged crime and heard no evidence about the circumstances surrounding it. The court thus concluded that the transfer decision was “too ill formed to constitute anything but an arbitrary decision.”

Citing to the United States Supreme Court decision in Kent v. United States, the Texas court reinforced the “primacy of appellate review in order to assure that the juvenile court’s broad discretion is not abused” in making the transfer decision. The court rejected the state’s argument that a reviewing court should look at the whole record, including statements made from the bench, to determine if there was any valid reason to support the juvenile court’s waiver decision. Instead, the high court held that the juvenile court has to “show its work” and “put its deliberative process on the record” in its transfer orders, as appellate judges should not “speculate” as to the juvenile judge’s reasoning or “rummage through the record” to find facts to support it.

The Court of Criminal Appeals also agreed with the intermediate appellate court’s finding that the record was legally insufficient to support the finding with regard to sophistication and maturity, as the state presented no evidence on this factor. The high court rejected as unsound the juvenile court’s flawed reasoning that Cameron was sophisticated and mature because he previously waived his constitutional rights and could aid in his defense.

While the decision is a victory for youth throughout Texas, it is particularly so in Harris County, where juvenile courts have a practice of “rubberstamping” requests to transfer youth to adult courts. According to the Center for Children, Law & Policy at the University of Houston Law Center, statistics show that in recent years Harris County—the largest county in Texas by population—waived more youth into adult court than the second, third and fourth largest counties combined. Harris County juvenile courts rarely deny transfer motions and in some years granted transfer in 100% of cases.

Cameron is represented by attorneys Jack Carnegie, John Hagan, David Adler, and Christene Wood. Juvenile Law Center authored an amicus brief, arguing that the juvenile court’s practice of waiving jurisdiction without an individualized determination is unconstitutional. The United State Supreme Court has repeatedly held that youth are categorically less mature in their decision-making, less culpable, and more capable of change than adults. For these reasons, Juvenile Law Center believes that youth should rarely if ever be tried in adult court, where they are subject to confinement in punitive prisons without access to treatment and rehabilitation services.